View full sizeMetro Birmingham's corporate community combined three economic development groups into the Birmingham Business Alliance to help the business community speak with more authority. The BBA in 2010 kicked off its Blueprint Birmingham effort to create a strategic plan for the region. (The Birmingham News file)

There's no one-size-fits-all box for corporate leadership.

In communities large and small across the country, it develops -- or it doesn't -- in ways as different as those communities.

Sometimes, it's a group of leaders who meet regularly and come up with a strategic plan to sell to the rest of the community. Other times, business leaders galvanize around a pivotal issue.

Either way, the act of stepping beyond the company walls, so to speak, can be controversial.

Corporate social responsibility, which covers everything from donating money to active involvement in political issues, can be good for a business' image, said Franz Lohrke, a Samford University business professor.

"But there's a counter-argument that businesses shouldn't do this, that that's not what businesses are created to do," he said.

Of course, on a local level, it's hard to dispute that improved schools, transit, infrastructure and general prosperity in a community also benefit business, he said.

"You can still get into some of the same arguments, as to whether businesses should be diverting their attention. Is that interfering? Is it distracting? It's not as clear-cut as it seems. It gets very gray very quickly," Lohrke said.

And yet business leaders in some communities have ignored that gray.

Here are two examples of how corporate leadership emerged and influenced two of Birmingham's peer cities.

Louisville

In 2003, Louisville was launched into a new realm for economic development with a city-county merger that was the first of its kind in more than 30 years.

The move, which came after three previous attempts failed, was driven by business leaders who helped finance a slick political campaign touting the benefits of merger.

"It is always the businessmen and women who understand the political boundary lines mean nothing in economic growth and opportunity," said former Louisville mayor and current Kentucky lieutenant governor-elect Jerry Abramson.

Abramson, who himself was a key part of the campaign, said numerous efficiencies in local government also were a result of the merger.

A change in the business community preceded the merger, said Ed Glasscock, a Louisville attorney who was heavily involved in the campaign.

Three separate groups, including the chamber of commerce and two economic development entities, went through their own consolidation in the late 1990s, forming Greater Louisville Inc.

"When we started this process, we brought in a consultant and developed a vision for the entire community," Glasscock said. "The consultant said the first thing was to merge city and county government."

At that time, the business groups were divided, so business leaders focused on making them one.

"Then we said, OK, we have our act together in the private sector. Let's get the merger moving," he said.

Glasscock, who has practiced law in Louisville since 1969, said business leaders' involvement in the merger campaign was part of a commitment to future generations.

"We love the community and feel we have an obligation to give back and improve it," he said.

Charlotte

Maybe you've seen the commercial during NFL games. A yellow school bus filled with kids and Charlotte Panthers -- including one Cam Newton -- is happily driving along a busy highway, past Charlotte's gleaming, high-rise skyline.

It's a commercial for the NFL's Play 60 campaign, which encourages kids to get off their backsides and get active for 60 minutes a day.

But that's not what this is about. It's about that imposing skyline and allegedly the businessmen who built it.

They are collectively known as "The Group" or sometimes, "The White Boys."

They were legendary Charlotte business leaders who, as the story goes, met every so often around a lunch-time table to take part in a meat-and-three and decide big things that Charlotte needed to do to become a world-class city, maybe the kind of city that ends up featured on a commercial for the most popular sport in America, pro football.

The group included John Belk, who ran Belk Department Stores for 50 years and served as mayor of Charlotte for eight, former Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl, former Charlotte Observer publisher Rolfe Neill, long-time department store executive George Ivey. And, there were others who came and went -- the head of Charlotte-based Duke Power, the chief of First Union, the Charlotte bank that became Wachovia and is now part of Wells Fargo.

The point is this: They deeply cared about Charlotte and its future and believed that what was good for Charlotte was good for their businesses and what was good for their businesses was good for Charlotte.

In an interview with the Observer, McColl summed up how the men led by telling how Belk decided the city needed a new convention center "regardless of what anybody thought, which incidentally is the way things were done," McColl told the paper.

The heyday of The Group came in the 1970s and '80s. During that time, Charlotte transformed from a midsize Southern town without even a major university into the headquarters of businesses, particularly banking. Its population exploded. It eventually became home to NBA and NFL teams, putting the Carolinas' biggest city on the map with a sports-crazed nation.

Charlotte was blessed to have a dynamic, forward-looking group of visionary business leaders who had a vision for what the city could become and they worked hard to make that vision a reality, said Natalie English, senior vice president for policy with the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce.

Birmingham

The story about The Group has made the rounds over the years to other cities, including Birmingham.

Alabama Power Co. President and CEO Charles McCrary smiles when he hears the tales of The Group retold and asked why Birmingham's most important business leaders don't come together for the common good of the community.

"I think every CEO in America has heard a version of that story, and how much of it is true, who can say?" said McCrary said. "Men like Hugh McColl, you don't find on any street corner, and I'm sure that he and the other leaders had an important, maybe critical role to play in how Charlotte developed 20, 30 years ago. I have no doubt of that at all."

But McCrary said that model won't work today.

"What would The Birmingham News editorial board write if Johnny Johns, Grayson Hall and I all met at dinner and decided what the future will be for the metro? For sure, they would write, 'Who do they think they are?' 'Who elected them?' And they would be right."

McCrary said leadership today is more complex than in the 1970s or 1980s -- or even in the 1990s

"The world is a lot smaller. Hugh McColl's world 30 years ago consisted of Charlotte. Today, his successor must be concerned about Europe, New York, Japan," McCrary said. "Same in Birmingham. And it's not democratic that one group decides all things for all people. We are more diverse. The problems are more complex. It requires a leadership that is more inclusive. ...